The good parts:
The movie is very sensitively filmed. The camera relentlessly explores every bump on Teller's and Simmons's heads like a documentary about Greek sculpture. It adds a lot to the feel of the movie in a wonderfully subtle way.
Simmons and Teller (as the "Studio" band director and the, I guess, protagonist young drummer) do a great job. Simmons in particular is really the nexus of energy for the entire movie, and owns that role with absolute precision.
The music, when it's actually music, is well-chosen and well-performed.
The terrible parts:
Simmons ("Fletcher") and Teller ("Andrew") are essentially the only characters in the film. Andrew's dad and his not-really girlfriend are secondary characters that serve to remind the audience what actual humans are like. Andrew is an insufferable jerk, and Teller does an amazing job of maintaining (mostly) a stone-faced, blankly insensitive look throughout almost every tense moment of the film. Simmons's Fletcher is a superb sadistic maniac. He's not "intense" or "volatile" - he's a psychotic monster.
I'm debilitated as a reviewer because my son is a talented young drummer, so I get to see good drumming all the time. The persistent trope in the film of Andrew drumming until his hands bleed is wildly unrealistic; that basically cannot happen if you're a drummer good enough to get into a prestigious music school in the first place. Everything else about Andrew at the fancy school, upon further examination, is completely unreal. He basically never talks to the other complete non-entities in the band. They're all like POWs, obeying the maniac director unflinchingly (except when they fail, when they're abused and ejected). My son (whose judgment I trust because he's also obsessed, but not a jerk) described the silly drum "competition" as "three people who can't drum doing shitty grind-core break beats". (To be fair, he liked the movie. What can you do.)
So OK, the movie is an allegory, and not intended to be realistic. So it's an allegory about how a sadist can really help a self-absorbed jerk with some obsession get better at what they want to do? I can't find any way to sympathize with that. I mean, who is that speaking to?
Finally, the actually appropriate and yet irritatingly obtrusive product placement (pristine cymbal labels, super-clean Zildjian logo on Andrew's stick bag, etc) got pretty hard to take by the (truly weird) ending.
Go see this movie because everybody else thinks it's great, but if you feel funny afterwards maybe this review will offer some comfort that you're not alone.
The movie is very sensitively filmed. The camera relentlessly explores every bump on Teller's and Simmons's heads like a documentary about Greek sculpture. It adds a lot to the feel of the movie in a wonderfully subtle way.
Simmons and Teller (as the "Studio" band director and the, I guess, protagonist young drummer) do a great job. Simmons in particular is really the nexus of energy for the entire movie, and owns that role with absolute precision.
The music, when it's actually music, is well-chosen and well-performed.
The terrible parts:
Simmons ("Fletcher") and Teller ("Andrew") are essentially the only characters in the film. Andrew's dad and his not-really girlfriend are secondary characters that serve to remind the audience what actual humans are like. Andrew is an insufferable jerk, and Teller does an amazing job of maintaining (mostly) a stone-faced, blankly insensitive look throughout almost every tense moment of the film. Simmons's Fletcher is a superb sadistic maniac. He's not "intense" or "volatile" - he's a psychotic monster.
I'm debilitated as a reviewer because my son is a talented young drummer, so I get to see good drumming all the time. The persistent trope in the film of Andrew drumming until his hands bleed is wildly unrealistic; that basically cannot happen if you're a drummer good enough to get into a prestigious music school in the first place. Everything else about Andrew at the fancy school, upon further examination, is completely unreal. He basically never talks to the other complete non-entities in the band. They're all like POWs, obeying the maniac director unflinchingly (except when they fail, when they're abused and ejected). My son (whose judgment I trust because he's also obsessed, but not a jerk) described the silly drum "competition" as "three people who can't drum doing shitty grind-core break beats". (To be fair, he liked the movie. What can you do.)
So OK, the movie is an allegory, and not intended to be realistic. So it's an allegory about how a sadist can really help a self-absorbed jerk with some obsession get better at what they want to do? I can't find any way to sympathize with that. I mean, who is that speaking to?
Finally, the actually appropriate and yet irritatingly obtrusive product placement (pristine cymbal labels, super-clean Zildjian logo on Andrew's stick bag, etc) got pretty hard to take by the (truly weird) ending.
Go see this movie because everybody else thinks it's great, but if you feel funny afterwards maybe this review will offer some comfort that you're not alone.